A new look for HumSS

Friday, 01 July 2011

Print by Paul Peter Piech

As part of the refurbishment of the HumSS building, a number of prints, posters and artefacts have recently been introduced in the public areas to make the building more interesting and inviting for staff, students and visitors.

Many of the new additions are duplicates of items in the lettering, printing and graphic design collections that are held in the Department of Typography.

Several of the prints are by Paul Peter Piech (1920-1996) who worked initially as an innovative commercial graphic designer in 1960s London. From the 1970s he concentrated on his own personal approach to the design and printing of woodcut and linocut political posters, book covers, and portraits of well-known contemporary and historical figures, ranging from Mahatma Gandhi to Emily Dickinson and Samuel Beckett (pictured).

Other material on the walls of HumSS includes: copies of 19th-century theatre posters for performances in Reading (outside the van Emden Theatre), and copies of 19th-century letterpress posters (on the ground floor corridors) also from the Typography collections. A selection of Roman coins, some copies of Egyptian low-reliefs from Classics and some prints from History of Art are also displayed on the ground floor.

Still to come to the HumSS collection are a number of 3D items: a horse's head, casts of Assyrian friezes from Art and some terracotta tiles made by the Reading-based company, Colliers. There are also plans to move the Ludovisi and Boston thrones which currently reside in a stairwell in Classics, to more prominent locations within the building.